On Islet Dispute Day, Here Is Seoul’s Stick-in-the-Eye to Tokyo

ByEvan Ramstad

The Wall Street Journal

The view from the southeast corner of Gyeongbuk Palace. Japan’s embassy is the red brick building visible between the two glass towers. This is taken from the point where the embassy is most visible. Walking a short distance in either direction and it becomes obscured.

Feb. 22 is one of the annual big days of diplomatic tension between South Korea and Japan as officials in the Japanese city of Matsue commemorate what they call “Takeshima Day,” a moment to claim ownership of small islets, known as Dokdo in South Korea, that are between the two countries. South Korea has controlled them since the 1950s.

In Seoul on Friday, a small group of South Koreans staged a protest of the event in Matsue in front of the Japanese embassy. And the South Korean foreign ministry later in the day officially protested the presence of a Japanese government official in Matsue.

The possession of Dokdo is one of several high-profile disputes that have more symbolic than economic or practical impact on the relationship between the two neighbors. But they complicate matters for politicians and diplomats and consume rivers of ink in the newspapers in both places.

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Last August, President Lee Myung-bak, in one of his last major diplomatic actions of his presidency, raised hackles in Japan by becoming the first South Korean leader to actually visit the islets, officially known in some other countries as the Liancourt Rocks.

But one of the lesser-known ways that Mr. Lee’s government has thumbed its nose at the Japanese government — figuratively, of course, though with real consequences — is by denying Tokyo’s request to rebuild its embassy in Seoul.

The stated reason: about one-fourth of the grounds of Japan’s embassy (and a portion of the embassy building itself) comes within a 100-meter zone around Gyeongbuk Palace in which, according to a law written in 2010, construction of buildings over 14 meters is disallowed. That means that anything over two stories can’t be built.

Anyone walking past the Japanese embassy will notice that it is now surrounded by four brand-new 60-meter-tall office towers, all of which are partly inside the 100-meter palace zone. As a result of the new construction, only a small portion of the red-brick Japanese embassy is visible from the southeast corner of the palace.

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Construction on Friday at Yonhap’s new tower, across the street from the Japanese embassy. It’s about 20 meters higher than the Japanese want to build, but it is beyond the palace restriction zone.

Meanwhile, just across the street from the Japanese embassy, Yonhap News, which is partially owned by the South Korean government, is building a new 55-meter-tall headquarters. It is beyond the 100-meter palace zone.

Japan wants to replace the embassy building, which is 23 meters high and has four stories, with a larger one. But it won’t be nearly as large as the office towers that now dwarf it. Instead, a portion of its new building will be 36 meters, or six stories, high. The rest will be four stories.

The current Japanese embassy building is now 42 years old and outmoded for a high-tech age. As well, some Japanese diplomats work in another office building a couple blocks away because there’s not enough room in the embassy itself.

Last year, Japan applied for an exception to the 2010 rule. But the Cultural Heritage Administration rejected the request last July, saying Japan’s taller embassy might “destroy the historical and cultural environment” of Gyeongbuk Palace. An appeal was rejected in September.

A person familiar with the situation said the embassy asked the Cultural Heritage Administration for more explanation about the risk posed by its proposed construction and heard nothing.

Oh Myeong-seok, who works in the Royal Palace and Royal Shrine Management office of the Cultural Heritage Administration, said the Japanese must keep their new embassy to below 14 meters inside the zone and 17 meters outside the palace zone. “We told them they should build according to the law,” he said. As for those other office buildings, their owners had permission to build tall ones before the 2010 law took effect.

Ironically, South Korea is building a much larger embassy for itself in Tokyo at the moment.

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